


Empty Spaces

by matchka



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Pre-War, copshipping, drifting apart and remembering what you had, passive-aggressive breakups, rule 1 in Prowl's house: a place for everything & everything in its place, they used to be happy once, tumbler's collection of weird mnemosurgery shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-19
Updated: 2015-05-19
Packaged: 2018-03-31 07:36:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3969527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matchka/pseuds/matchka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tumbler and Prowl used to be good at compromising.</p><p>The end of a relationship, and how perception changes what we experience in the after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Empty Spaces

**Author's Note:**

> the copshipping hole got deeper, and I think I'm starting to like it down here.
> 
> Unbeta'd, all mistakes are my own, and apologies in advance for any errors or misinterpretations.

_What shall we use to fill the empty spaces_

_Where we used to talk_

 

_Pink Floyd, Empty Spaces_

 

It doesn’t take Tumbler long to gather up his belongings. Everything he owns fits neatly inside a flight case. Most of it has never left the case; Prowl has always had a ‘thing’ about clutter. He finds Tumbler’s habit of accumulating strange objects frustrating and incomprehensible. Still, they compromised, and there’s a shelf at the rear of their apartment which houses the pride of Tumbler’s collection: an ancient brain module preserved in a jar of anti-corrosive fluid.

They used to be good at compromising.

The jar sits at the bottom of the flight case, wrapped in a tarpaulin, and there’s an empty space on the shelf, surrounded on either side by an orderly row of Mechaforensics-issue datapads. A ring of dust marks where it once sat. Its absence is an analogy.

There was never very much of Tumbler in this apartment to begin with. And that was okay, once. It was okay because there was Prowl, and he liked the way he’d slotted so easily into Prowl’s neatly-ordered life. He liked the space that had been cleared for him, that small chaos in the tidiness of it all. And Prowl’s smile, a mere twitch of the lips, the meaning behind it evident but unspoken: _I wouldn’t do this for anybody but you._

It had meant everything to him, that gesture. It still does.

He doesn’t like leaving this way – slipping unseen from their – _his –_ apartment, no goodbye, no note, just absence. He thinks that perhaps, after everything, they deserve a better end. But they’d only end up fighting, and he’s so tired of it now – the same arguments, rehashed and repeated, Prowl’s refusal to ever be wrong about anything and Tumbler’s sulky, protracted silences shutting down all attempts at resolution. There was a middle ground, and they can’t seem to find it anymore.

He imagines Prowl on his return, scanning the silent apartment, registering his absence. He imagines Prowl pausing for a moment in the centre of the room, rearranging his mental inventory – things missing, things moved, things taken. And then he’ll sit at his desk, lose himself in his work and it’ll be as though Tumbler was never there at all.

*

He’s almost right.

What happens is this:

Prowl is immediately aware of something amiss the moment he steps into the apartment. The ambience is different; the sensation of empty air where there was once something else, something warm and familiar.

He enters the apartment. He is so familiar with the minutiae of each room that he can tick off in less than sixty seconds a complete list of everything that has been taken, cross-referencing and annotating. Not a break-in; each missing item has a common characteristic, a thread linking them to a singular realisation. He approaches the shelf at the back of the room, notes the empty space where the jar (that stupid, hideous, _ridiculous_ jar) used to sit.

And he isn’t surprised. He’s accounted for the likelihood of this; one of several possibilities generated in anger, in the increasingly long gaps between argument and reconciliation. Lying silent and unmoving beside one another in the dark. Not touching. Wanting to touch, knowing it will only prolong the slow, inevitable shattering of their increasingly fragile connection.

He’s known for a while now that this might happen. Tumbler doesn’t deal in confrontation. He runs away from arguments, keeps his head down and his mouth tight; his approach solves nothing, _heals_ nothing. And Prowl…Prowl pushes. He gives no quarter, because his logic is infallible. Except when it isn’t, and Prowl is so certain of his own logic that he’s not sure where the line of fallibility is drawn anymore.

Prowl reaches out a hand. Touches, for the briefest of moments, the empty space that Tumbler once occupied. The life they shared. Gone, now, like everything else.

And then he sits at his desk, pulls a datapad from the pile stacked tidily in front of him, and loses himself in his work.


End file.
